Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/396

406 small. One seems to be looking at the prettiest miniature city, of a sort of miniature humanity. The public buildings have an affluence of columns. The private houses have all the same construction. The dwelling-rooms, larger or smaller, are all arranged like cells, around a court, with a little flower-garden, in the centre of which is a marble fountain. Between the rose-court and the inner cells, Gynnecœum, or ladies'-room, is the conversation-room, a kind of general saloon, or square open to the court. All these rooms (belonging to the ladies) received light only from the side next the court. I could not have breathed nor have been at all comfortable in them, although decorative paintings and arabesques might cover the walls, and however much the court might have been adorned with lovely little fountains, with shells, Cupids and other little statues, and however beautiful their roses might have been which bloomed there; this world it seems to me would have been too much circumscribed. I was agreeably surprised by the beauty of the fresco-paintings which still are preserved in many of the rooms. Those eyes, they still have life as if they still lived, and in these countenances what expression! Any thing deeper, or more true to life is seldom met with even in the paintings of the present day. So in this picture of Ulysses and Cleopatra, and in this other of Eneas and his mother! And in the animals, and in these mythological figures, Satyrs and Fauns, what life what humor! What affluence in these saloons, and dining rooms, of the sweetest forms, from the world of flowers, birds, and fantasy! Everywhere the endeavor to adorn and beautify daily